I guess, most of those who decided to switch, did so because of distrust in Twitter’s privacy or because they feel that they’re tolerated more by the Mastodon community. At first glance, the largest groups are artists, gender-activists, sex-workers, anti-consumerists and technology enthousiasts.

Mastodon creates stronger filter bubbles than Twitter. There is no such thing as a global timeline. To follow the discourse, you have to follow each member one by one. If a post gets popular, you won’t notice, unless you followed someone who reposts it. It requires not only her nickname to follow someone but also her server name. There is plenty of servers that themselves construct filter bubbles through presenting only “local” timelines.

It’s hard to follow public discussions as you initially only see original posts in your Mastodon client. (I guess that lack of analysis and display is for scalability and traffic reasons.) Even if you follow someone, their answers are not visible in your timeline. You need to browse to their profile page to see their replies. (General shadow-ban?) Hence, you can almost be sure: there’s no audience in debates on Mastodon.

The (non-)publicity of timelines does not protect from data abuse. It’s easily possible for Mastodon hosts and users, to plug in some data logger to sell keyword counts to third parties. Users have to trust both, just as at Twitter. Blocking is also possible. In contrast to Twitter, users can config their access permissions towards other users to increase privacy. Mastodon’s like-analogues are private between liker and likee while the count is public.

It’s easy to program bots for Mastodon and many hosts tolerate partially programmed user accounts. There is botsin.space which hosts only bots. My impression is, that openness, diversity and freedom are the big values of the current Mastodon community. However, closed groups of surpressionists are able to setup a Mastodon instance, too, optionally invisible. That means, Mastodon supports a further granularization of society.

In other words: If you want to feel comfier in Social Media, then switch to Mastodon and risk isolation. If you (also) want to be in to contact with disagreeable opinions and want to have your opinion questioned, then rather stay on Twitter and hope for not being blocked.

I hope you know about podcasts, because those are the newspaper of audio books. If you never listened to a podcast, please try it now. There are tons of podcasts for any topic you like. I currently cannot stop listening to a total of 53 subscriptions! Some of them release new episodes every day, some weekly, some monthly. Episodes can be few minutes long or hours, and above all really interesting and entertaining! It’s a great way to spend your hands-free time during travels or house hold activities.

If you are into podcasts, you may enjoy AntennaPod as much as I do. It’s much like a highly customized radio. It automatically downloads the newest podcasts to my Android phone PDA when I am in my Wi-Fi at home. This saves huge costly mobile traffic on travels; and you don’t need to worry about actively refreshing the playlist because that job is taken by AntennaPod’s automation.

Spotify also supports podcasts. However, you don’t have as many features:

Stop playback and resume at that exact point some time later, e.g. when you felt like listening to music on Spotify between the episodes or because you got interrupted by a nice passenger! On Spotify, I usually fail to return to the correct chapter of the audio book I listened to.

Speedup playback by factor 1.3!

Manage your subscriptions in one central place (e.g. gpodder.net), AntennaPod will care about the rest.

You can customize most of those features. For example, you can increase the speedup up to 4 (quadruple speed) or decrease the factor down to 0.5 (slowdown to half). Or if 10 seconds are not enough, you can configure a rewind between 5 and 60 seconds. The coders even thought of your favorite episodes: You can disable that AntennaPod auto-deletes them. If you really need to, you can also stream episodes without download, e.g. when your storage is stuffed with those bloody videos your parents keep sending to you because they are so much fun.

The interface is very intuitive. If you just want to listen to some podcasts you can start right away. If you want to customize more, just go ahead. AntennaPod is open-source, free for download and actively maintained. There’s no other open-sourced podcast manager advanced as much. It’s probably my favorite smartphone app.

There already has been great dispute about why Firefox needs a new extension framework. Well, with version 57 there will be a new one. Many add-ons I am used to will be discontinued. But there is hope for new, better add-ons.

Cookie Autodelete 🔗 deletes cookies as soon as you close those tabs that created them. What is that for? Cookies are used to track your browsing behaviour. Facebook is even able to track you on any site that contains a Facebook share button. I configured this addon to delete them immediately. But you can keep the default configuration of 3 minute delay if you want. That is helpful for example if you don’t want to get logged out of Facebook because you accidentally closed it. Then you can still restore the tab using Ctrl+Shift+T and it remains in the same state.

Decentraleyes. 🔗 Its owner will continue development despite the new framework. Every site has a component for interaction and one for static content such as images, stylesheets, javascripts and even videos. As a site hoster you like to concentrate on content and its interactive generation, but not on all the the static stuff such as styles, images and Javascript. So hosters delegate it to Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Akamai is such a famous CDN. However, CDNs also have their downside from the user perspective. They also record all requests for content as well. They store statistics about who accesses what file and when. On one hand, they need those statistics to work right. On the other, they can sell that information to their customers and third parties. The fact that they can usually means that, they do. Therefore, Decentraleyes mounts itself between you and the CDN. When firefox fires a request for some CDN-hosted file, Decentraleyes will answer instead of the CDN for most of the content (styles and javascript) and it’ll reply with a file that it already stored on disk. The CDN won’t notice any of these requests.

I don’t care about cookies. 🔗 The EU demands every page that uses cookies to display a warning. The user is supposed to notice and click to accept cookies on that page. However, the other addon, Cookie Autodelete, deletes them anyway. So, you can use I don’t care about cookies to hide those distracting warnings. Sadly, this addon won’t delete flash cookies / LFOs. At least you can prevent flash apps from creating LFOs if you reconfigure your flash installation manually.

Link Cleaner. 🔗 Similar to how CDNs maintain a record of file accesses, site hosters themselves like to track the user. One way is to alter links in a way that a hoster’s server is accessed before firefox is redirected to the actual link. Often those alternate links are built by prefixing a different domain. If you would remove that, you could directly access the external link and avoid that the hoster can keep a record. Link Cleaner does exactly that.

HTTPS Everywhere. 🔗 Usually, HTTP is unsecured as in unencrypted. If somebody would want to read what you type on facebook, they could simply spy a bit on your local area network and see. No matter how strong your facebook password is. Luckily major platforms such as facebook already use HTTPS by default. But you can easily prepair for unpopular sites, too. With HTTPS Everywhere.

Page Screenshot.🔗 Take full screenshots. No need to scroll manually. Firefox 57 comes with it’s own screenshoter, however Mozilla decided to host any picture you take with it on a central server. As an attentive user, this usually means that they’ll track and sell these. Edit: NO NEED. You can save your screenshots without any upload.

Readling List. 🔗 A seperate bookmarks list and side-bar for to-be-read websites. An offline Pocket, so to say.

I’m still looking for a few more replacements for my old set of add-ons. Also, I still miss completely new privacy add-ons. For example, one add-on could simply block auto fill in login screens such that Facebook won’t be able to guess who I am.